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She rested it on the floor and, having opened the application with a self-timer, pressed the button, then stood facing the trio of large windows, her back to the camera.
Three seconds.
As she ran her hand along the curve of her ass, she turned.
One second.
Growing hornier by the second, Carrie dug her fingers into the plump flesh.
Click.
She started the timer again. This time she stood in profile as she unhooked her bra.
Three seconds.
The garment buckled, and a shudder went through her as the cool air puckered her nipples.
One second.
The garment fell, and she cupped her breasts.
Click.
Once more, one last time. Only now she laid the camera flat on the floor and knelt. She set the timer and watched the woman pull aside her panties.
Three seconds.
With her free hand, she stroked one finger along her sex. On-screen, her bare pussy shone with the arousal she’d built up just in the last few moments.
One second.
She slipped one finger inside herself.
Click.
For a few seconds after the last shot, Carrie remained in her pose, watching the display that went on. Taking pictures at work had always proved problematic. By the time she had finished, she was always so horny she couldn’t wait to get home and finish off. Today at least she had a little bit of privacy.
Her eyes on the camera, she moved her fingers between her thighs. It was a ritual that had preceded technology: when she was younger, she used to prop a mirror between her legs and pretend it was someone else’s finger playing with her. Years later she’d tried a finger vibe, but in the end it was the fantasy of being toyed with by some unseen figure that made her come.
Behind two closed doors, she didn’t worry that anyone might hear the breathy little sounds she made. Each gasp of pleasure that followed the trail of her finger around her clit burst from the back of her throat.
The last thing she saw before the screen went to sleep was bare pink flesh shiny from contact with her sex.
She closed her eyes and sank on one hand. In her mind, a faceless stranger knelt behind her. She imagined his breadth and his strength eclipsing her. Her clit throbbed as she envisioned him mounting her. She pushed against her knees, rocking forward and backward to the motion of her hand, rubbing herself to match his unrelenting pace.
Unable to stay upright any longer, she bowed to the floor and pressed her face against the carpet. Her fantasy man grasped her hips and held her in place as he pumped her.
Her climax surged up and she squeezed her lips together to keep from screaming. The man of her imagination thrust hard one more time and vanished like dust. Everything vanished, everything but that throbbing burst of euphoria that held her in its grasp.
She rolled onto her side and sucked in a deep breath. Her fingers stilled around throbbing flesh. She threw her arm over her eyes, barring the light pouring in from outside. Blindly she felt around for her phone, then she peered at it from beneath her forearm.
Eighty-seven messages.
She posted her latest gallery and stretched out on the floor, too lethargic to get up. She knew that number would be more than doubled by the time she got home. It always did when she was feeling naughty at work.
Chapter Two (#ulink_58b34708-98ee-5c4d-adc1-e5a8f6b861a2)
I’ll have to rein it in before I get caught stripping and rubbing out at work, she thought as she headed home for the day.
The very thought of stopping bothered her. She liked the way she felt when she took her pictures. She liked the person she was in the pictures.
She had been nineteen when she’d first shared a grainy picture taken with an external webcam. She’d taken shots for boyfriends, and in her last relationship she had let Frank film her as she went down on him.
This was different. Taking them, sharing them was as exciting as foreplay. How could she get so turned on by the thought of someone out there, perhaps in some faraway country, getting off as he scrolled through a series of pictures of her stroking her wet pussy? How was it possible that posing alone in her living room, sunk into a chair with one leg slung over the arm and a camera between her thighs, made her so horny?
It had started when she stumbled across a blog linked by one of her favourite erotic writers. From there, she found blogs of women just like her, regular women and couples, who just liked sharing. She had been inspired by others who did it not for money but for the thrill of it.
The married couple who kept a sex diary of their swapping lifestyle, or the bisexual student who was cataloguing his post-small-town sexual experiences one Polaroid-style snapshot at a time. So many videos, photos and stories from ordinary people like her who were just eager to show off.
And so she’d started her blog, which she simply titled Dirty Pictures. She created a persona, Maggie, who liked to dress up in the most sinful lingerie and play with a collection of toys, who liked to show off for a faceless and adoring audience.
Dirty Pictures was her thrill, her compulsion, and it was becoming her addiction.
One that was starting to get out of hand, if having to break and enter that day was any indication. The urge was always with her, and it was getting worse. How does one quit exhibitionism?
The possibility of having to do so rankled with her as she approached the intersection where she had taken her pictures that morning. She wasn’t addicted. She just liked the novelty of her pictures. One day the novelty would wear off, and that would be the end of it.
This new obsession had everything to do with Frank and the shitty card he’d dealt her. She needed the pictures now. She needed the pictures to feel, to stamp out the embers of anger and betrayal that still rekindled themselves far too frequently.
As much as she wanted to retreat to the sanctuary of her apartment, she had run out of tea. Tea was her last excuse. As long as she had tea, she could put off going to the grocery store and just pick up her lunch at one of the dozens of shops that surrounded her workplace. She could pop down to the pizza shop at the end of her road, or head in the opposite direction for fish and chips to go, from the pub around the corner, but she would not do without her tea.
She pulled into the grocery store and, before getting out of the car, slipped her hand into her purse to touch her phone, then yanked it away.
I don’t have to look, she thought. Not yet. Not until I get home. There’ll be time enough for that after the dishes are clean.
And so she went shopping, gritting her teeth as she ‘excuse me’d and ‘sorry’d her way from aisle to aisle. By the time she’d amassed a cart full of goods to get her through another week, she was seething. She hated being in large crowds of people, or even small crowds. She’d made it less than an hour and was standing in the checkout line when she caved, reached into her purse and pulled out her phone.
It was a mistake to even look, but she just couldn’t help herself.
One hundred and eleven messages.
She smiled and opened the app.
‘I’ll bet it doesn’t take much to make you wet, Maggie.’
She peeked over her shoulder at the older man standing behind her with a scowl. He probably didn’t even own a computer and got his rocks off with the same VHS he’d had since the 80s, playing it in the same worn-out machine.
She scrolled down.
‘At work, rubbing myself under my desk. Can’t stop thinking about you touching yourself through your panties.’
Her finger quickly swiped through the messages, catching the ones from her favourite readers – though some professed as much, she still couldn’t bring herself to think of them as fans:
‘Gorgeous, but need more of that clear dildo opening you up to get me hard.’ This from a man in Ireland.
And from a bisexual tattoo artist in Oregon, ‘Would love to bury my face between your thighs.’
And from the couple who kept their own record of their swinging lifestyle, ‘Love it when you wear garters.’
The usual suspects, and a few newcomers, some of whom didn’t even read English and responded in what she guessed was Swedish.
She kept scrolling, contemplating her Sunday performance, when, in the midst of the adoration, a startling phrase caught her eye.
‘Keyes Tower?’
Her blood ran cold as she read on.
‘Can’t believe it. So close. PMed you. Please message me back.’
Keyes Tower.
Her office building.
Someone had recognised it.
Finger shaking, Carrie deleted the comment and dropped her phone back in her purse.
The next few minutes stretched on. She leaned on her cart feeling frozen.
Someone, some stranger, knew where to find her.
* * *
As soon as she threw open her front door she dropped her bags and headed straight for the computer. The damn machine seemed to take for ever to boot up. She clicked the shortcut for her blog and enlarged the last photo she had taken that afternoon.
She had been so eager to take her pictures that she didn’t think about the view from the window. And there it was, behind the lewd woman in the pictures. It was barely noticeable in the corner, but unmistakable to anyone who worked or played downtown: the domed clock tower that squatted in the centre of the city. Behind it, the signal masts from the fortress in the background.
As careful as she had been to turn off geotagging, as careful as she had been to show as little of her apartment as possible, she had given herself away with a single landmark.
Carrie rested her elbows on her desk and buried her face in her hands.
Could it really have been so thrilling just hours ago when she took that picture? Could she really have been flooded with glee over being adored as she stood in the grocery lineup? And now she felt sick.
Since starting her blog, since becoming Maggie, Carrie had been careful to keep the persona separate from her true self. It was why she never showed her face. She wanted the adoration. She wanted the fantasy. She wanted to keep her obsession behind drawn curtains and locked doors.
Someone knew where to find her.
She sat back in her chair and placed her hand over the mouse. Click here, click there, and she reached her account page.
The arrow hovered over the delete button.
Stupid.
She could hear herself talking to Frank that night he had pulled out his camera. ‘No, I’m serious. Once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back. Would you want the whole world seeing you sucking a dick?’ It had become a joke at the time, and in the end she’d agreed to let him take the video, but whenever she thought of it she wondered if he had deleted it when they’d called it quits, or if it was still on the memory card. Or maybe he had uploaded it. If his attempts at sexting after the break-up had been any indication, he probably still had it tucked away somewhere on his hard drive. When they had been together she had trusted he wouldn’t, but now, well, since she didn’t know Frank as well as she thought …
This picture, the one that told the world exactly where she had been when she took the picture, was out there. Even if she took it down, even if she deleted her account, it was out there, and whoever had contacted her would still know she had taken that picture in Keyes Tower.
She went to her private messages, scrolled through the junk she usually ignored and found the message with the header ‘Keyes Bldg’.
Carrie opened the message but didn’t read it, not at first. She needed a minute to brace herself for whatever the message contained, and so she dragged her groceries into the kitchen. She went to the bedroom and changed into a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt. She poured herself a glass of wine, gulped down half right there at the counter, and returned to the living room and to the message.
‘First of all, don’t freak out. I’m not some creepy pervert trying to stalk you, it read. I work in an office about two blocks from where the picture was taken and recognised the view. I’ve been reading your blog for about two months now and wondering who in the hell you were. I’d love to find out in person. It’s not every day I get a chance to meet my fantasy woman. Below is a little something for you to put us both on the same level. Message me – B.’
Her heart in her throat, she clicked the link.
A video came up, frozen for a moment before starting, and then Carrie was looking at a man’s torso. He was well built, lean and muscled, with a tattoo on his shoulder – she couldn’t make out what it was. The screen wobbled, and the next thing she saw was a tanned woman with large breasts. She was on her back, thighs parted to show off a plump mound with a landing strip leading up from dark pussy lips. The camera panned lower, and the man’s cock came into view.
The woman cooed as he worked the tip in. The camera went in and out of focus as he began to fuck her, his cock wetter with each withdrawal. His pace picking up quickly as breathy sounds came across metallic through Carrie’s shitty computer speakers. He pumped hard and deep. The woman’s moans escalated as he reached down to finger her clit.
The video lasted just under five minutes, culminating with the mouth of the woman’s sex throbbing around his dick. He didn’t come. Instead, the camera panned back and displayed his hard erection hovering over the woman’s flushed pussy.
Carrie closed the video and sat unmoving. She was as wet as the woman in the video had been. The heat between her legs was unbearably hot. As always, with the first hint of her arousal she had the compulsion to reach for the camera and perform, but this time she repressed the urge. Instead, she drank her wine and stood. She was so slippery, and a little ashamed that she could feel the wet evidence that what she had seen had turned her on.
Just like she turned her readers on.
She watched the video again, tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth as she gazed at the couple. When the video stopped for a second time, Carrie leaned over and clicked on the profile.
Nothing to indicate gender. Nothing at all, just a generic userpic. Not even a location. Aside from the video, ‘B’ didn’t exist.
Is he the messenger? Or is it her? Did it matter?
‘Unless it’s a crank,’ she said to herself as she returned to the kitchen. ‘Anyone familiar with the city would know the clock on sight.’
Another glass of wine. Another deep gulp. Then, a deflated moment of relief.
The clock, yes. Keyes Tower, specifically? No.
She sank back into her chair and went back to the private message.
The only way to know what she was dealing with was to message him or her back.
She hit reply and began to type.
‘Doesn’t put us on the same level. How do I know that’s you in the video. You could have gotten that anywhere.’
Sent.
She was on her third glass of wine when the reply peeped on her phone. She bypassed it and went for the computer.
